Apologies aren’t necessary, you tell Letitia. So relieved to see your student alive, you can’t stop smiling foolishly.

  She has a medical leave from the university, Letitia says. She was able to convince the family doctor in Las Cruces that she’d some kind of breakdown like mononucleosis, she’d returned home to her parents’ house where she slept a lot, and her mother fed her, “mononucleosis” is something they could understand, they could research online, and you treat “mono” by mostly just resting so that was OK—“If they had some other idea, like my mother might’ve, or my sisters, what was going on with me, they didn’t say anything. They wouldn’t, to my face.” Letitia laughs, wiping at her eyes.

  You ask if Letitia’s doctor in Los Cruces actually examined her. If he’d done bloodwork. But Letitia shrugs off your questions.

  You tell Letitia that she’s looking much, much better. Obviously, she is feeling better . . .

  Yes. Much better. She is.

  Like a dutiful student Letitia tells you that she tried to keep in touch with several other writers in the workshop: she felt “really bad” to let them down, and to let you down; being in a workshop means supporting other people’s work but it was this “really shitty time” in her life that wrecked so many things for her, and hurt other people like some friends she lost because she just couldn’t see them or even talk with them ’cause she didn’t want to answer their questions and they’d see that she was behaving in a weird way.

  You tell Letitia that she doesn’t have to apologize. Of course, you understand.

  Embarrassed, Letitia tells you that she can’t come to the workshop that afternoon, either. Someone is waiting for her, she just can’t.

  Someone waiting, just can’t—vaguely Letitia gestures in the direction of a parking lot.

  You feel an impulse to laugh. Of course, Letitia is going to miss this final class even as she is insisting how she’d loved the class, how much she’d learned from you and how grateful she is . . .

  Letitia shrugs evasively when you ask what has happened to her since you’d last seen her.

  “Well—some things. Lots of things.”

  “What does that mean, Letitia? ‘Lots of things’?”

  Letitia laughs again, blushing. Clearly she has no intention of telling her professor what is making her laugh so shrilly.

  “But—you have a medical leave? Until the fall?”

  “Maybe longer. That depends.”

  “You are coming back to school, though? You’re not going to quit permanently, I hope.”

  “Well—that depends.”

  Your former student is determined not to contradict you for to contradict you would be to protract the conversation which has become awkward as if the two of you have met on a narrow walkway and must maneuver past each other without touching.

  “But you are—all right, Letitia?”

  “I told you, ma’am. I’m OK.” Letitia is beginning to sound edgy, as if you are treading too close.

  All right. OK. A kind of code. You are each speaking in code but neither you nor Letitia is certain what is being communicated.

  Still, you are vastly relieved. Alive, alive. Letitia Tanik is alive!

  Less than an hour before you’d been sick with guilt. Thinking that you might have saved the young woman’s life and had failed to save it would have poisoned the remainder of your own life after the loss of your husband.

  That you must still expiate—that loss. During this long day in Albuquerque you will avoid thinking about it.

  As Letitia continues to speak you understand that, to her, you are an adult—an adult with authority. She has no idea of your unimportance at the university, or in the world. She sincerely believes that you are a “professor”—you are an adult with power of some kind. You have written two memoirs, you have published two books. Some of the students in the workshop have read these books and perhaps Letitia is one of them, for at the start of the term she’d been highly vocal, she’d participated enthusiastically in the workshop. You are like no one Letitia knows and so you are not to be trusted, not fully.

  Yet, you are a figure to be placated. Even now she must placate, seduce you. It is her way of relating to a stranger.

  You have hesitated to ask Letitia about her rapist. The rapist.

  Letitia has been waiting for you to ask. What has become of the engineering student, if anything; did she ever report him, or talk to anyone about the rape beside you? Did she really see a doctor, did she get a proper gynecological exam? You doubt that the assailant has been charged with the crime, or even questioned by police officers. You sense this.

  At least Letitia isn’t living in the same residence with him. (Or so you suppose.)

  Yet: when the mist of grieving has cleared you’ve found yourself seeing again the shirtless young man leaning on the third-floor balcony railing, you recollect him leaning indolently, a beer can in hand; you recall another person, a young woman stepping out onto the balcony to join him, or confront him—you hadn’t seen clearly enough to identify.

  She has gone back to him. The rapist.

  You feel a sinking sensation. Can this be true?—you don’t want to consider it.

  But it’s not for you to judge, you think. Not for you to accuse.

  You are unable to ask Letitia about any of this. Or why she’d failed to answer your emails.

  You don’t want to seem prying. You don’t want to sound accusatory, disapproving.

  Letitia is eager to change the subject. She has learned so much from the workshop, she claims. She has learned so much from you.

  “Like, encouraging us to keep journals. That changed my life, actually. I mean—I knew about journals but never started one. I guess I thought—how could you leave anything out? How could you stop writing a thousand pages? Like—Anna Karenina? War and Peace? Once I started, I was afraid I couldn’t stop. The words just poured out. This thing that happened to me—you know—maybe I have written a thousand pages but it’s online, not in an actual journal someone could find. I couldn’t come on campus ’cause I was sick, I mean actually I was pretty sick, some days I hardly got out of bed, I was so tired, it was like mononucleosis actually. But I’ve been writing, I know it’s too late for the course ’cause you’re giving me an incomplete, you were really, really nice about giving me an incomplete but maybe, if this is OK, this story I wrote, if it’s, like, worth an A—or a B—you could give me that grade instead of the incomplete? Is that possible? I know I’ve missed classes—I know that. I guess you can fail a course by missing classes, like a seminar once a week, each time you miss it’s like missing three classes, right?—I know that. I take responsibility for that. But anyway, here’s this”—Letitia hands you a manuscript of about thirty pages, you catch a glimpse of the title “Urgent Care.” “It’s, like, a part of something longer. Not a memoir—more like a fictional story. You know, ‘made up.’” Letitia laughs giddily.

  It is eerie: looking at Letitia Tanik you can see in her dark glasses only your own wraithlike face, in miniature.

  Almost 3:00 P.M., the start of your workshop. Several students have passed you and Letitia on the walkway, headed into the building. They glance curiously at you, and at Letitia; they will have noted Letitia’s shiny dark hair no longer streaked with neon colors, but they have not lingered to speak to her, or to you.

  You wonder: Do they know about their classmate Letitia? Has she confided in any of them? Have they suspected—something?

  But what happened to Letitia, does Letitia herself really know?

  How to give meaning to a narrative. When the nature of what has happened isn’t clear even to the person to whom it has happened.

  You prepare yourself for Letitia to hug you as she’d hugged you in your car, dare not breathe waiting for Letitia to hug you another time but (you are not disappointed: you’ve steeled yourself) already Letitia is turning aside with an embarrassed murmur—“Thank you for changing my life, Professor. OK?”

  In the end, a trite phrase. Wave of her hand, wan lipstick-smile, someone is waiting for her elsewhere and Letitia has to leave.

  * * *

  “NO ONE!”

  On this final class day, a stunning sight: none of your students has showed up.

  Entering the seminar room on the ground floor of Memorial Hall and discovering to your dismay, chagrin, shame—no one is there . . .

  The long oval table takes up most of the (empty) room. On the floor, a discarded paper bag out of which a food-stained paper plate has slid. There are several shoulder-high windows with dingy panes that glare with a vague opaque light.

  Though you can see that no one is here, no one is likely to arrive, you enter the room, drop your book bag on the table, stand staring, thinking, smiling inanely.

  What a fool you are! You’ve come on the wrong day.

  A day late, the course has ended.

  Some of the students came, not many. They went away again.

  You will never see them again.

  NO: THERE HAS BEEN A MISUNDERSTANDING.

  You re-enter the seminar room, it is another time. The Plexiglas barrier between you and the others has vanished, like a spell lifted.

  And soon now, the memory of the Plexiglas barrier will seem to you just a dream. A bad dream, among many.

  You are (still) upright and alive and the proof of it is, when you enter the seminar room on the ground floor of Memorial Hall there are figures—faces—arranged around a long oval table awaiting you.

  At first, the faces are blurs, smudges. You cannot identify the faces by their features—there are no features.

  Then, as you stare, the flat smooth blurs begin to “fill in”—become “familiar”—as if by an effort of your will; to your relief their names return to you as well with a sort of liquid magic—Melanie, Zora, Trev, Frankie, Brett, Wyn, Simon . . .

  And here, another surprise, that leaves you stunned and blinking away tears: these smiling strangers have brought a large untidy bouquet of daisies, goldenrod, Queen Anne’s lace, and hollyhocks for you! To celebrate the conclusion of the workshop, it seems.

  They are fond of you—are they? These individuals? Almost shyly murmuring—Hi, Michaela!

  (For you have encouraged them to call you “Michaela”—not “Professor” and not “Mrs. McManus.”)

  Smiles come fluttering at you like butterflies. Laugh in delight as your eyes fill with tears. Truly you are thrilled, grateful thanking these thoughtful persons for the flowers which have the look of flowers haphazardly gathered by hand, snatched from a wild field and all the more precious for being wild. Rapidly your brain calculates: you will bring the bouquet to Gerard in the hospital. You will surprise Gerard in the hospital. You will hope that Gerard hasn’t noticed your absence and that he will be warmly surprised when you return as if you’d just stepped out of the room. For this is still a time when your husband can appreciate flowers though (possibly) it has become a time when the very beauty of flowers is wounding to the eye jaundiced by illness. Perhaps there is something repugnant and cruel about bringing beautiful flowers to the terminally ill . . .

  Thank you, thank you! Oh, I love you . . .

  Not an outburst you dare. Just—cannot.

  But—this air of celebration, congratulation. As if your students understand how you have protected them from your broken self. The contagion of your despair, the (devastating) fact that language is a futile adversary against death, you have kept from them and in this way you have given them hope.

  Yes. I can do this again. One more time.

  And if it is done by me then I am the person who has done it—I am that woman.

  You feel like a swimmer who has bravely—recklessly—plunged into a river that seemed placid at shore but turns out to be moving swiftly, far more swiftly than you can navigate, bearing you helplessly downstream. Flail your arms and kick wildly to elude the undertow, with tremendous effort manage to swim to the farther shore and emerge staggering, exhausted and your lungs burning—but on your feet.

  If he could know, Gerard would be proud of you.

  Always he’d supported your work: writing, teaching.

  Those years of marriage when your husband loved you and was your closest friend and (yes) would have sacrificed his life for yours, would have wished for you to outlive him.

  Over now. Must move on now.

  Kick, flail your limbs!

  For this final workshop you’ve brought the class macaroons from a bakery in Santa Tierra, clementines and bunches of South American seedless purple grapes, “organic” nuts and lentil chips, seltzer water.

  You’ve brought plastic cups, paper plates and floral paper napkins to be passed about, gaily. Suddenly, a party! Frankie has brought cupcakes with pink frosting, she’d baked herself.

  Trev has brought two six-packs of Coors beer. Zora has brought two six-packs of Diet Coke.

  How foolish it seems to you now, you’d imagined that these individuals had grown hostile to you. Recall how you couldn’t seem to hear them through the Plexiglas barrier, they couldn’t seem to hear you. Last night you’d lain awake for hours dreading that no one would show up for the final workshop.

  Frequently this semester you’ve overheard students making plans to meet outside the workshop, to further critique their work. You’ve brought strangers together into a little community that, though inspired by you, will exclude and outlive you.

  Take pride, Michaela. Try.

  Your mission in the West is ending, you think. A (single) plane ticket has been purchased. Boxes have been packed, sealed. The (untenanted, empty) house on Monroe Street, Cambridge, awaits its (newly sole) owner.

  The garage attached to the house awaits. The vehicle purchased in Gerard’s name which has become your property now.

  Try to recall the interior of the garage. Try to recall how airtight it is—you suspect, not much. The rattling overhead doors have never closed against the pavement floor—there must be an inch, two inches gaping.

  You can’t leave New Mexico, however, without making a pilgrimage to the several sites marked with asterisks in Gerard’s Lonely Planet Guide to New Mexico. These are not mere tourist landmarks but (possibly) junctures with the other world—the boundary between worlds will be thin there. Passing from one into the other will not require a superhuman effort. It will not be “unnatural.” It is likely that, if you have the courage, you will be able to confront Gerard’s spirit and accompany it into the other world as you’ve been instructed.

  Calmly you think such thoughts even as you oversee your class with something more than your usual presence of mind. For such thoughts are a comfort to you.

  For even dread, if it is a dread specific to you, is a comfort to you.

  SIMON KHRAW, ONE OF THREE MEN in the workshop, has accumulated, by his account, more than three hundred pages of a memoir of his childhood and adolescence titled Life-in-Progress. This afternoon he is submitting the third chapter, a continuation of an account of childhood pulmonary illness (bronchiolitis) within a barely functioning working-class household in Albuquerque, narrated in a dry, droll manner.

  In a tense quavering voice Simon reads a section describing how by the age of ten he’d nearly died several times, had to be rushed to the ER at Albuquerque General Hospital, even intubated, with the consequence that his parents came to resent him, grew indifferent and even abusive to him. He recounts having overheard his mother complain to a relative when he was just nine: “Mom said sure, I love Simon, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say we’d all be kind of relieved if he just—‘passed away.’” Simon laughs shrilly, pressing his fist against his mouth.

  This is a shocking revelation. No one will look at Simon. Since you are seated near him you reach over—instinctively—and place your hand lightly over his hand, which is trembling.

  Simon gives a little start. His impulse is to snatch his hand away but he resists.

  There is a pained silence. Though there have been poignant revelations in the past in the workshop you have not ever touched anyone, that you can recall. (Letitia Tanik was an exception, but you had not touched Letitia in class, in front of witnesses.)

  Soon then, the moment passes. Discussion begins as usual, as if nothing out of the ordinary has occurred.

  BUT WHAT HAVE YOU DONE, Michaela? Why?

  Often you’ve noticed that Simon seems to avert his gaze from you, even when you address him directly in the workshop. Curtly he will murmur Yes, right. OK. Thanks!—his expression stiff, impassive as he takes notes on a laptop.

  Other times, you see his glassy-green eyes sliding sidelong onto you, when he might guess you aren’t aware.

  How old is Simon Khraw? Impossible to determine.

  A boy’s features squeezed inside the ruin of a middle-aged face.

  Youth, eagerness, hope squeezed inside defeat, resignation, resentment.

  Simon invariably wears a short-sleeved white cotton shirt to class, chino shorts that fit him loosely. On his wrist an expensive-looking digital watch with a black blank face of the kind that have to be touched to reveal the time as if secretly, to the wearer.

  His skin is curiously unlined yet the skin itself appears to be desiccated as parchment paper. His eyes are alive, alert, wary, like the eyes of a hyperactive child, slightly protuberant. His tightly wavy sand-colored hair gives him the look of a store mannequin: artificial, prissy. But when you look more closely you see that his hair is receding, his angular hands tremble with what might be anxiety, or eagerness, or impatience. A nerve appears to be frozen in his left cheek, that doesn’t allow expressiveness on that side of his face, and you feel, or imagine that you feel, a pent-up intensity in Simon’s lean body, that yearns to discharge itself.

  Passages in the memoir speak of courses in computer science at Cal Tech but no years and no ages are given. Certainly Simon is no longer young.

  Illness has aged him, prematurely. Illness and the fear of illness.

  Simon is one of the better writers in the workshop but he isn’t a workshop presence. If he were absent, probably no one would miss him. (You would not miss him, as you would miss your more vocal, outgoing students who call you Michaela casually, and smile at you.) Out of shyness or perversity Simon speaks rarely and then in terse and elliptical remarks as if he were thinking out loud. It’s possible—probable—that Simon with a degree from Cal Tech considers himself superior to his classmates in the workshop, most of whom don’t have college degrees; or, as an insecure male Simon is self-conscious in the presence of attractive young women to whom he is invisible.